
“Enforcing Ecology: Geographies of the Cattle Fever Tick”
Journal of the Southwest 62(4)
Winter 2020
“From the eradication period to the contemporary moment of concern, tick fever changed in popular understanding from an endogenous affliction, a natural part of the landscape, to an invasive threat from Mexico. This was made possible by producing the U.S.-Mexico border as an ecological line, and using the border’s two functions to reinforce one another. Reading tick science and eradication-related agency documents from 1884 to the present, this article traces how the ‘fever
line,’ at first determined climatically as the area above which there wer fewer than 200 frost-free days, was made congruent with the U.S.-Mexico border, and how that border fever line both enabled and was reinforced by metaphors used to describe the disease. Applying the language of
quarantine to ecology transformed a porous and shifting isotherm into a bright-line border, in turn enabling the rhetoric of “threat,” ‘illegality,’ ‘vigilance,’ and ‘invasion’ now used to justify wall building.”
Journal of the Southwest 62(4)
Winter 2020
“From the eradication period to the contemporary moment of concern, tick fever changed in popular understanding from an endogenous affliction, a natural part of the landscape, to an invasive threat from Mexico. This was made possible by producing the U.S.-Mexico border as an ecological line, and using the border’s two functions to reinforce one another. Reading tick science and eradication-related agency documents from 1884 to the present, this article traces how the ‘fever
line,’ at first determined climatically as the area above which there wer fewer than 200 frost-free days, was made congruent with the U.S.-Mexico border, and how that border fever line both enabled and was reinforced by metaphors used to describe the disease. Applying the language of
quarantine to ecology transformed a porous and shifting isotherm into a bright-line border, in turn enabling the rhetoric of “threat,” ‘illegality,’ ‘vigilance,’ and ‘invasion’ now used to justify wall building.”